During last week’s LMA conference, I had the chance to sit down with Pat France, VP of Marketing at Incisive Media.
Lindsay Griffiths is the International Lawyers Network’s Executive Director. She is a dynamic, influential international executive and marketing thought leader with a passion for relationship development and authoring impactful content. Griffiths is a driven, strategic leader who implements creative initiatives to achieve the goals of a global professional services network. She manages all major aspects of the Network, including recruitment, member retention, and providing exceptional client service to an international membership base.
In her role as Executive Director, Griffiths manages a mix of international programs, engages a diverse global community, and develops an international membership base. She leads the development and successful implementation of major organizational initiatives, manages interpersonal relationships, and possesses executive presence with audiences of internal and external stakeholders. Griffiths excels at project management, organization, and planning, writes and speaks with influence and authority, and works independently while demonstrating flexibility in thinking, especially in challenging situations. She also adapts to diverse and dynamic environments with constant assessment and recalibration.
In 2021, the ILN was honored as Global Law Firm Network of the Year by The Lawyer European Awards, and in 2016, 2017, and 2022, they were shortlisted as Global Law Firm Network of the Year. Since 2011, the Network has been listed as a Chambers & Partners Leading Law Firm Network, recently increasing this ranking to be included in the top two percent of law firm networks globally, as well as adding two regional rankings. She was awarded “Thought Leader of the Year” by the Legal Marketing Association’s New York chapter in 2014 for her substantive contributions to the industry and was included in Clio’s list of “34 People in Legal You Should Follow on Twitter.” She was also chosen for the American Bar Association Journal’s inaugural Web 100‘s Best Law Blogs, where judge Ivy Grey said “This blog is outstanding, thoughtful, and useful.” Ms. Griffiths was chosen as a Top Author by JD Supra in their 2019 Readers’ Choice Awards, for the level of engagement and visibility she attained with readers on the topic of marketing & business development. She has been the author of Zen & the Art of Legal Networking since February 2009.
LMA Session Recap: Emergence & Benefit of Social Networking for Legal Professionals
One of the hottest topics up for discussion at last week’s Legal Marketing Association’s Annual Meeting was social networking. From Twitter to Facebook, blogging and tweeting, it almost sounds like a foreign language to the uninitiated. The LMA even warranted its very own hashtag (#LMA) on Twitter to keep track of all the comments flowing through the twitterstream. My own affinity for social networking brought me to Friday’s breakout session, “Emergence & Benefit of Social Networking for Legal Professionals,” led by John Lipsey, LexisNexis Martindale-Hubbell’s Vice President of Corporate Counsel Services. The session turned out to be a broader look at social networking than some of the attendees would have liked, but a number of valuable points could still be gleaned. If you’d prefer to read my comments in tweet form, my tweets from the session follow this post.
Social networks involve reputation management: In a Web 2.0 world, you lose control over your own messaging, so a shift is necessary from attempting to control the message to managing your reputation and that of your firm. Because everyone has a voice on the internet, you never know where your next opportunity, or public relations crisis, will come from. As recent incidents have shown, what you say online can affect your career and is not easily erased. Similarly, what others say about your and your firm online can also impact your reputation. The key here is understanding that whether or not your are participating in social networks, the conversation is happening. So getting involved in social networking allows you some control over what is being said about you and your firm, and the ability to react to what others are saying. To monitor the conversation about you and your firm, John suggested setting up Google alerts for your name, your firm’s name, and considering extending these to specialized practice areas to keep abreast of what online chatter might be affecting your reputation. Continue Reading LMA Session Recap: Emergence & Benefit of Social Networking for Legal Professionals
It’s not easy being green: LMA looks at what you and your firm can do to help save the planet
On April 2nd, I attended the Legal Marketing Association’s breakout session, “Going Green: What You and Your Firm Can Do to Help Save the Planet.” Initially, I was not scheduled to attend this session, but I was recruited by Alvidas Jasin, the Director of Business Development at Thompson Hine and the program’s presenter. I was not sorry that he’d dragged me into the session, because what followed was an informative, entertaining look at how law firms and individuals can “go green.”
Alvidas first determined by a show of hands that three people in the audience had an internally branded green program at their firms, with two of these also branding externally. To start, he gave the group some motivation for “going green,” based on Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. Explaining that the earth’s average temperature is 59 degrees, compared with -67 on Mars, 333 on Mercury, and 855 on Venus, Alvidas said that the higher temperatures of the other planets can be attributed to their proximity to the sun, but also the density of the planet’s atmosphere. In terms of the earth, as carbon dioxide concentrations grow, the atmostphere becomes more dense and traps radiation that was previously able to escape. Because of this, 22 of the hottest years on record have occurred during the last 25 years. Though warming and cooling trends are not uncommon, they normally occur over millions of years, not 50 years. Scientists feel that because of the latest warming trend, there will likely be no snow or ice on the North Pole as soon as 2013 – only four years. On the South Pole, there is 1 1/2 miles of snow and ice, but the increase in temperature is causing chunks of this snow and ice to break off, crash into the ocean and raise sea levels.
Contributing to the increasing levels of CO2 is that 75% of electricity comes from fossil fuel plants and there has been an overall increase in the earth’s population. It took 162,000 years to reach 1 billion people on earth. In the following 2000 years, this grew to 6.5 billion people. At this rate, there will be 9.1 billion people on the planet by 2050, when we are struggling to find adequate resources already. In terms of CO2 output, the United States is twice as bad as the next worst offenders, Russia. Continue Reading It’s not easy being green: LMA looks at what you and your firm can do to help save the planet
The Call of the Legal Marketing Association’s Annual Conference
It’s that time of year again – time to head to the Legal Marketing Association’s Annual Conference. This year’s theme “Change…Now What?” is particularly appropriate for the challenges that we’re all facing in the current economy. According to Peter Vieth’s article in Virginia Lawyers Weekly, “the slump in the economy has led to the
To Tweet or Not to Tweet? Why Lawyers Should Pay Attention to Twitter
Last week, Tanya Prinz, a legal marketer on Twitter, wondered whether an attorney’s time is better spent on current client development than on exploring social media. With thirty to forty percent of law firms blocking social networking sites, it’s a question I was interested in exploring further. First, I posted it to my Twitter followers. The general consensus is one I support as well, that you can and should do both. Professional Marketing Advisor, Nancy Myrland said “If you believe in marketing, then both.” She later commented that “as time goes by & usage grows, we WILL be spending time with current clients when we spend time on Social Media.” Lawyer and Vice President of Exemplar Law Partners, Steven Shapiro agreed, saying “are the two mutually exclusive? You can do customer development through social media.”
Relationship building and communication are key to successful business development, both in terms of working with current clients and attracting new ones. Social networking is simply another tool that can be used to build and maintain relationships. While it will never replace face to face contact, social media, such as Twitter, is worth exploring for lawyers. But why?
– People hire lawyers they know and like: Social networking is another way for lawyers to show clients and potential clients who they are and to highlight their professional accomplishments in a way that is accessible. Along these lines, as Bob Ambrogi comments in his “Tweet 16” on why lawyers should use Twitter, social media allows you to:
“Mold your image: Those who post regularly to Twitter provide others a glimpse of their daily lives. That glimpse can help shape your public image. Do your posts paint you as a high-powered professional — now writing an appellate brief, now preparing for a deposition — or as a trivia-obsessed slacker, now breaking for lunch, now off for drinks? By thinking before you post, you can shape how others see you.”
Posting on a site like Twitter, or making your professional background transparent on LinkedIn, can make you approachable to clients and potential clients, making them more comfortable coming to you when they need help solving a problem.Continue Reading To Tweet or Not to Tweet? Why Lawyers Should Pay Attention to Twitter
Is the Billable Hour on its way out?
Last week, I read a post commenting on the “End of the Billable Hour,” which has become a hotter topic in the legal industry in the current economic situation and in light of Evan R. Chesler’s comments in the New York Times. In his post, Tim Marman discusses the idea that the billable